Page:Ling-Nam; or, Interior views of southern China, including explorations in the hitherto untraversed island of Hainan (IA cu31924023225307).pdf/182

 178 Ling-Nam.

Its Chinese name is Sha-mo-ling, “ Mandarin Hat Hill,” and it is evidently considered the presiding genius of the place, the differentiating medium by which the geomantic influences of wind and water are distributed over the eity and plain below. The city has been built with reference to it, the street that runs from the east to the west gate being laid out in a direct line with it, so that in walking toward the cast its solemn head looms up continually before the eye. It is an object of super- stitious awe, and is used in imprecations by the natives. To wish that aman may go to the top of Sha-mo-ling is a curse of dreaded import, and is especially feared by the Hunan people, whe come and go in great numbers. It is the reputed abode of a dragon which can on occasion pour forth floods of water and deluge the country, as happened some years ago, when a most disastrous flood overwhelmed the plain, water rising to the roofs of the houses on the higher ground in the city. The people attribute this flood to the combined influence of thunder and the dragon, and declare that from the bowels of the hill the water burst forth with a most portentous rumble, and swept in an irresistible flood over the plain. The water, however, did not all come from this hill, nor yet from that still more remarkable place the great water- fall, thirty miles north, as the people in that vicinity assert ; but a rainfall of almost unexampled abundance— a waterspout, in fact—burst simultancously along thirty miles of the mountainous region that forms the eastern border of the Lien-chow plain; and the narrow pass, two miles below the city, was too small to allow this sudden and enormous volume of water to escape, 50